Misdirection and Misinformation by Liz Manning

After much talking and what I like to consider ‘virtual exercise’ (i.e. discussing it online), I finally got round to signing up for the sponsored walk I’d promised to do with friends. And, at last, I started some training for the 10 mile midnight hike.

Yesterday, on a roll of enthusiasm, I completed my second hike of the weekend, a 4.5 mile walk with my husband. At least, it should have been 4.5 miles. We got lost. Twice. We finally made it back to our car after 7.5 miles. Thank goodness sunsets are getting later.

I’ve been thinking about how we got lost.

Starting in a local nature reserve, the number of paths leading away from the car park proved more than those on the map. So when we followed the instructions to veer right with the path and then turn left, we didn’t realise that these directions were for further along the track. So we ended up back in the car park after just twenty minutes and had to retrace our steps and try again.

Then as we followed an urban part of the route crossing from canal path to river, we missed the promised wooden bridge but found signposts to the path instead. These pointed us down an apparently private road alongside some abandoned industrial land, deliberately blocked to traffic partway down, and no further path signs.

None of this matched the map, so we retraced our steps again. Eventually, we spotted the wooden bridge, and squeezed along the overgrown path to it. We crossed the river and turned immediately left, only to find a large fence built right across our way.

My husband suggested returning all the way we’d come – but we were over halfway now. So we went back to the signs, checking we’d read them correctly, crossed the barriers in the road, ignoring the ‘Private’ and ‘CCTV in use’ warnings, and started following an ugly, potholed, rubble of an unmade road, separated from the roar of the dual carriageway by only a thin line of shrubs.

We could see where we were on the map now, even though the road wasn’t marked, and eventually spotted a fallen sign for the path itself, pointing us left alongside a small stream, into a park and back onto the original route (also with a fence across where it should have gone). The rest of the way was easy going and lush with vegetation.

So what has all this to do with writing or being a Christian? Well, some lessons come to mind:

1.       Inaccurate or unclear writing makes understanding difficult for readers

2.       Illustrations need to match the writing

3.       Sometimes backtracking makes things clearer – where we went wrong, where we need to do something different – but other times we just have to take things on faith and keep heading in the right general direction before things become clearer

4.       An extra three miles doesn’t feel quite that long when you’ve got someone with the same goal travelling with you

    

Liz Manning fits writing around being an Occupational Therapist, BB captain, wife, and mum to two adult sons. Or perhaps it's the other way round. She blogs regularly at 

https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/